This invention relates to a spray assembly and particularly to a spray assembly suitable for use in the car wash industry.
In the car wash industry, spray assemblies commonly are used to apply cleaning and waxing solutions to the bodies of vehicles, and rinsing such bodies with high velocity streams of water. In the past, such assemblies have been deployed along the path of a vehicle advanced through a car wash system, and mounted in fixed positions or arranged to oscillate. More recently, such spray assemblies have been designed to provide high velocity streams of fluid in orbital patterns. Such orbital spray assemblies have been found to be particularly effective in not only providing a larger area of coverage but reaching previously, not easily accessible areas such as wheel wells and the underbodies of vehicles. While such recently developed spray assemblies have been found to be highly advantageous in providing an improved cleaning performance, they further have been found to have a number of disadvantages. They often have been found to be complicated in design, expensive to manufacture and often require constant maintenance, principally due to leakage. It thus is the principal object of the present invention to provide an improved orbital spray assembly which is comparatively simple in design, relatively inexpensive to manufacture, highly effective in performance and relatively maintenance free.
In achieving the aforementioned objective of the invention, the present invention generally provides an assembly for spraying a fluid in an orbital pattern generally consisting of a support member, an elongated member universally connected to the support member intermediate the ends thereof, a drive shaft having a crank arm mounted thereon for rotational movement therewith, a universal connection between the crank arm and an end of the elongated member and the opposite end of the elongated member having a fluid passageway provided with an inlet connectable to a fluid supply line and at least one outlet. Preferably, a number of circumferentially spaced outlets are provided, each of which includes a nozzle disposed at an angle to the longitudinal centerline of the elongated member to provide a large area coverage as the dispensing end of the elongated member is moved along an orbital path.